Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
A few things I learned that may save someone time:
(1) Sound quality is in the medium, not the build. Speakers almost always sound better than a pair of cans (headphones), headphones almost always sound better than IEMs, IEMs almost always sound better than over the ears.
(2) The difference in sound quality between something that is a few hundred dollars, and something that is a few thousand is so small that "diminishing returns" as a phrase doesn't do it justice.
(3) The stack of DACs, EQs, preamps, and neatly managed RCA/XLR cables looks cool on your desk - but they take up a lot of space and cost a lot of money for something that sounds maybe 10% better than a pair of AirPods Max (provided you remember to turn on lossless in apple music, which I forgot to!)
We had 2 "living room" setups for a while, upstairs and down. We eventually realized how dumb that was, and condensed to 1.
Doing that, we stopped using some really expensive speakers and started using some that were 1/5 the price because we couldn't tell the difference.
Then, one day, I brought those expensive speakers down and set them up. Wow. There was a definite difference after all. I'm not an audiophile and can't tell you what that difference was, just that both of us could immediately tell the expensive speakers were better, and we were not going back to the cheaper ones. Nothing else in the setup changed.
Also, I eventually upgraded the receiver to something that could better drive those speakers. An upgrade from $600 to about $900. And there was a definite difference there, too. The older box should have been enough, but it just wasn't.
Do I recommend that someone on a budget spend $4000 instead of $1500? Nope. It's not enough difference. But for stuff we already had, or for someone that really cares, it's definitely better.
Also... 'good' is something you first need to agree on when talking with people. Some people like to have 'distorted' playback (compared to the original), because they "like" that better. That is the moment retailers can sell objectively worse but overpriced stuff.
Genelecs for instance are very detailed, neutral etc (there is a reason you see them everywhere in professional settings), but consumers don't necessarily have an appetite for 'objectivity'.
+1 though for the thought that the medium makes the biggest part of the sound quality.
Also read positive things about the moondrop old fashioned, to mention an alternative to the porta pro in a very close form factor, not the strange ear clips that are the KSC 75.
I'd argue that the additional space should give the form factor an advantage, though sure, being closer to the ear might also be one. And no doubt, given the huge popularity of IEMs the technology must have seen a lot of progress, so I might be wrong.
2) Absolutely and it's constantly getting better.
But they do interact with the environment. Having walls which reflect the sound can mess with the sound. Changing speakers won't help. Changing headphones can help.
Yup. Got plaster walls, vinyl flooring, narrow room, different sizes of rattling single-pane windows…
Neighbors with leaf blowers…
I really like my noise canceling headphones. :)
I bought some custom IEMs and had the opportunity to test ~10 of the super high-end options from several different brands. I found that there was no correlation whatsoever between price or even brand and how good they sounded to me. The technician I was working with said he observed the same thing all the time in the professionals he worked with. He'd have musicians on the same instruments in the same roles in the same group come in and all walk put with completely different products.
IEMs are the most personal but even headphones have the problem.
Because of this, my recommendation is that you make purchasing decisions in one of two ways:
- Learn how to EQ to get a sound you like. Purchase based on objective measurements like frequency response curves to find products that require minimal EQ to match your preference.
- Only buy after listening, or buy, listen and return if that's an option for you.
I recommend avoiding purchases based on reviews that make subjective judgements about the sound.
If you want to learn more, I like the videos/articles/forums of Headphones.com and Crinacle.
For (2), again it depends. Some companies build amazing things for cheap, some companies build crapshoot for tons of money. The trick is to find the sound you like for the cheapest price.
For (3), the simplest chain is the best(est) chain. I used to have a high-end 2x10 band eq which sat between pre and power stages. I removed it, and I'm happier. Unless I'm listening vinyl, I bypass loudness and tone circuits even.
There's a funny thing in audio. When you increase the resolution too much, the problems in old/remastered sources become apparent, and you can't enjoy that material anymore. A good Hi-Fi system is meant to create enjoyment, not motivation to spend more money on more equipment or sources.
Lastly, for casual listening, even the basic airpods provide plenty of resolution and detail.
It doesn’t need to even be that old. I’ve got stuff from small musicians and they don’t have the equipment to make perfect recordings. You can’t tell with good headphones, but you put it through an amazing pair of speakers and it gets fuzzy.
My information might be outdated, but aren’t those the kind that sort of sit loosely at the outside of your ear canal (like the original iPod headphones)? If so, those are the one kind of headphones that I find basically worthless. I’m not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but in the iPod era I could never understand how people tolerated those when you can get vastly better sound for a few bucks. I figured the distinctive apple-brand headphones were kind of a status symbol.
AirPod pro sounds fine, though.
3rd generation Airpods, while don't isolate, sound pretty epic for what they are. When sitting at home, I can listen to some music and genuinely enjoy it, and I like their non-isolating nature because it helps me to hear traffic around while walking with them. The only problem is, talking on the phone with them might get a little noisy for the other party, but I believe phone hardware filters some of it.
When compared to their rivals, they really have higher resolution, and enjoyable sound balance. Also, iPhone scans your ears with FaceID camera to profile them, so they are also tuned for your ears from get go. This makes positional audio really shine, too.
The original iPod buds were pretty flat and tinny. I used to use a pair Sennheisers (I don't remember the model but they were pretty high end) to be able to enjoy what iPods had to offer, back in the day.
Of course there is a difference between cheap gear and decent gear. But the difference between decent gear and audiophile gear is non-perceptible in a blind ABX test. And here is the thing: especially in the elctronics side (so amps) decent gear has become increasingly cheaper.
Audiophiles also tend to have downright naive claims about sound, like the silver cable sounding more clear and "silvery" while something with gold would then sound warmer and richer. All while they measure the same down to inperceptable differences. And of course the device with the walnut case sounds warm because wood is warm and so on.
It would be funny if it wasn't auch a successful con.
As others have pointed out, the biggest thing to focus on is the speakers or headphones, at least up to a point: $70,000 Woo-woo Labs Reference Monitor speakers aren't going to sound any better than the decent set of Wharfedales you found on eBay.
sometimes i remember about this space and laugh. i guess i found thinking i would find some data for a speaker i was looking for back in the days but it turned out into audiophiles typing their absurd: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php
another funny demographics is mechanical keyboard enthusiasts by rating sound of switches and discussing over minimal numbers of gf (grams-force) in same type of switches (linear, clicky etc.). often times there are videos showing sounds of hundreds of USD keyboards with owners hunting and pecking hahaha
1.0 out of 5 stars
Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2010
We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.
PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long… I will type as fast as I can.
DO NOT USE THE CABLES!
We were fools, fools to develop such a thing! Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this… accurate. For a few short days, we marvelled. Then the… whispers… began.
Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly… we began to UNDERSTAND.
No, no, please! I don’t want to remember! YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME REMEMBER! I saw brave men claw their own eyes out… oh, god, the screaming… the mobs of feral children feasting on corpses, the shadows MOVING, the fires burning in the air! The CHANTING!
WHY CAN’T I FORGET THE WORDS???
We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.
Do not use the cables!
8,955 people found this helpfulMusic lovers buy audio equipment to listen to their music.
Audiophiles buy music to listen to their audio equipment.
I love that you ended your rant with an audiophile myth :)
Lossless isn't even diminishing returns better. People can't tell the difference in an ABX test.
That said, you don't need to break the bank for good stuff and it does make a huge difference. There's also a lot of marketing out there for bad equipment. Apple air pods and beats headphones and more.
for the speakers, get active speakers, as big as you can, and connect them to a dac that costs more than 100usd, and you're good to go. after that it's diminishing returns land.
also by virtue of you having 2 spaced ears, stereo speakers will have sound cancellations (in the ~1k hz region? i dont remember very well) for mid signal.
Around COVID lockdown #1 I did a lot more walking outside, pushing a pram and listening to music on headphones.
For years I'd been using cheap wired headphones from exhibition swag and things.
I put a pair through the washing machine. Top tip: this is really not good for them.
I looked online and found I could buy a brand new pair of my preferred Sony in-ear ones for $NotALot.
I bought the absolutely top of the line most expensive bass-boost in-ear buds.
They cost the equivalent of $20 (about £15) and the sound is amazing.
The point being here: because all the fashion-victims want Bluetooth, wired headphones have got really cheap and top quality premium grade ones cost less than a modest meal, or alternatively perhaps, less than I could easily drink in beer while listening to 1 CD or album.
Shun wireless. Go back to wired. Get an adaptor if your phone doesn't have a socket. You can get really good earphones for very little money now, they never need charging, never go flat, never need pairing, are compatible with every OS able to play sound, and they come with a handy tool to stop them falling out and you losing them, called "a cable".
Also: the microphone is great as well. I've recorded podcasts with them. The quality is way better than my £300 over-ear sound-cancelling premium Bluetooth headset, which I now only use while onboard aeroplanes.
Out of curiosity, what did you get?
I've used them regularly for about 5 or 6 years now and the paint is wearing off. The only readable markings are the [L] and [R] indications for which goes in which year.
Something akin to these:
https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/in-ear-headphones/mdr-ex6...
Nickel/neodynium bass drivers, quite large and chunky compared to cheaper Sony 'phones. The cables go into a separate fat little cylinder to which the earbud itself is permanently attached at a fixed angle.
However, they're not noticeable in the ear at all and they're very comfy to wear.
These are listed at £40 now but before the recent burst of inflation I think about half that is plausible.
It’s the least important part of any system and indeed my Quad amp and CA R50s are wired with twisted, braided, brown lamp cable as a nice aesthetic homage.
About the only things you could do wrong would be using wire that's too small to carry the load, is frayed/broken/severely corroded, or is coiled in a way that inductance becomes a real issue. Running parallel and near electrical or signal wires is problematic, and largely different run lengths can make a difference.
Today, I'd still use "mains wire" if I can find it in a 100% copper form with the correct cross section. The reason I used "speaker wire" in my set is because the recommended cable was thicker than the standard stuff, and I didn't believe that I'd be able to get 100% copper wire easily.
> Please always use a good quality loudspeaker connection cable from an audio dealer. To prevent impairment of sound quality, we recommend cables with cross-sections of at least 2.5 mm² for lengths up to 3 m and at least 4 mm² for lengths above 3 m.
Interestingly, the table present in the printed manual is not present in the one on the internet. IIRC, recommendation for 100W up to 3m was 3mm² or 4mm² at minimum.
From what I looked at, 14AWG is ~2mm² and 16AWG is 1.3mm². Way too skinny for what the manufacturer says.
Unless you're running speaker cables parallel to some power cables, shielding is not a requirement from my experience. The cable I use is at [0]. I have a roll like this. Mine is thicker than 2.5mm² though.
[0]: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71Jr0vhSTsL._AC_UF1000,1...
This is just a unit issue. See:
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/wire-gauges-d_419.html
Those numbers are also ridiculous. They’re recommending 13AWG or higher for a 3m run. That’s about 20 feet round trip, which is about 0.04 ohms. The speaker should be 8 ohms nominal, but let’s call it 1 ohm at some very audible frequency to be conservative. So you might lose 2% of your power or maybe 0.1dB. Keep in mind that you cannot hear frequency-independent attention at all (the volume knob fixes it), so you’ll only hear the frequency-dependent part, which will be smaller, and your speaker plus room already has frequency dependence far in excess of 0.1dB. Note that the speaker power doesn’t even factor in to the calculation — as you supply more power, you’re increasing the current and voltage accordingly, and the effects cancel out.
At very high power you may care about heating. That recommended cable has an NEC ampacity of 15A or more, and 15A^2 * 8ohms = 1800W. Derate a bit because you’re at higher frequencies than 60Hz and you are just fine — in fact, the voltage will become a safety problem at silly power long before the resistive heating matters.
I will admit that there is a good reason to use at least 18AWG cable or so: speaker cable terminations are utter crap, and the crappiness seems to get worse as the fanciness goes up. A thicker wire is more likely to survive being terminated, within limits.
Buy some 16AWG two-conductor CL2 or CL2R or CL2P cable at your home improvement store and be done with it.
> Unless you're running speaker cables parallel to some power cables, shielding is not a requirement from my experience.
I have never heard mains hum coupled from a passive speaker cable. That’s not really a thing — there just isn’t enough power to make it audible under normal conditions.
The shielding might not be needed, the low cost for single conductor wire is why I mentioned it.
The person I was responding to was mentioning they can’t find appropriate “main power” cable. (So probably not in the USA )
And the UL-listed stuff is fantastic, because UL cares about the insulation and jacket. There is plenty of “speaker” wire with crappy insulation that degrades after a few years, but I’ve never seen an actual CL2 or CM or CL3 (or their R or P variants) or THWN(2), TC(-ER) etc, cable, from the last 30 years, with any such issues.
16AWG CL2 cable is fantastic speaker wire, and it’s cheap and you can buy it at any store that sells electrical supplies. TC-ER is great if you need something bigger than 16AWG (the longer the run, the thicker the cable you need to keep resistance below 1 ohm or so), but it’s a bit harder to find.
The thing that can be genuinely hard to find is nice twisted-pair or shielded twisted-pair cable in any format other than category (Ethernet) cable, and that tends to max out at 22-23AWG and may have the wrong number of conductors for whatever you’re doing with it. For making up an RCA cable, this is completely unnecessary — use RG59 or RG6 cable if you need particularly good shielding. But for long runs of balanced audio cable, you want actual twisted pairs, 23 AWG is plenty, but you may need those pairs shielded from each other to minimize crosstalk. So you end up with commercial snake cables, and those are not cheap. Some people use digital stage boxes these days, because an effectively transparent ADC and all the electronics needed to make it work can be cheaper than the fancy cables.
Somewhere far w.r.t. US. :)
> 16AWG CL2 cable is fantastic speaker wire,
Yet, it's way thinner than the manufacturer of my speakers recommend, which start at 13, and only go up. In my case I need 12 or 11. I don't remember honestly.
The good thing is, I managed to get a roll of the correct cable made by Acoustic Research. While the cable is not "fancy", it's copper, has the correct thickness and it's jacket still feels like day 1, and that thing is 10+ years old at this point.
For RCA cables I still use the factory default set came with my amplifier. Japan made, with very flexible jackets and gold plated connectors. That provides more than enough clarity for me.
on a more serious note.. doesn't seem like the "good" audio was good? there is a huge difference between noise free audio and garbage integrated audio / speakers with hizz imbalance and peaking... if the "good" audio is bad then there obviously won't be a difference between any of them.
which makes me think... banana and mud are noise filters... hmm...
So yes, the “good” audio is good.
You have the original recording (A) and play through whatever chain recording it at the end, resulting in recording (B).
You now place A and B into seperate tracks of the DAW of your choice and align them in time. You flip the polarity on B and adjust the levels till the output level is minimized (to account for level changes in your playback/recording chain).
The mixed signal is the difference. If it is imperceptibly silent, the difference is in fact imperceptable.
And with this simple method you can demask a metric ton of bullshit, like differences in wire materials or capacitors materials.
So next time someone tries to sell you chemicalliy pure copper with zero oxygen handbraided by virgins for a thousand bucks test it that way against a cheap pro audio cable, then turn your system up to the loudest listening volume you usually use and litterally listen to the difference. It will unsurprisingly be the sound of silence, your own personal 4'33".
Bonus point for using an double-blind ABX process where you and potential others don't know whether you're listening to the expensive or the cheap gear. Turns out often anything short of that won't stop you from wanting to fool yourself, or others from influencing you, which is a big part of the audiophile schtick and the reason why even otherwise pretty smart people are routinely fooled by this.
I dunno, it reproduced my Muddy Waters LPs perfectly.
You need source, digital to analog conversion, pre-amp, amp, speakers to have low distortion too, and you need the room to be appropriately treated too. I didn’t look at whether they did all that but I seriously doubt they did.
Outside of the hyper-crazies, no one is really stating that a 6-12 inches of conductor is going to make a giant difference in audio quality. Yes, I'm aware of the super-premium-gold-plated-platinum-encrusted 12" audio patch cords available. But almost no one really makes serious arguments those do anything.
I don't think running a 50ft banana is going to have similar performance to a 50ft properly-sized copper conductor though.
Where you get into the "debate" is the difference between buying a spool of 12ga stranded copper wiring from Home Depot, or buying the same thing only with de-oxygenated or whatever silliness some audiophile brand is selling for 10x the cost.
There are levels to things. I imagine copper speaker wire to be essentially fungible. Just size it to your length of run and max power needs. Calculate the total resistance for your wire run and done/done. All professional level sound installations for venues and what-have-you do this already.
This sort of test just seems to prove nothing in either direction other than provide bait for folks to point and laugh (or defend) in comment sections. Consider me baited, I suppose!
I feel the same way about wine. At a certain point, it's not really about objective improvements, it's about vibes and lore.
That said, think there is value in putting out facts that let people make informed decisions and not spend tons of money on things that don't actually work.
(And yet: They still make inexpensive cables in factories every day.)
In other words, they got fooled.
What’s happened in electronics is that there’s a cutoff, above which the audio quality doesn’t get any better, but that cutoff is much lower than anybody can believe. So the psychological cutoff is higher than the physical one, and a role of marketing is to raise that cutoff even further.
https://www.audiotherapyuk.com/product/oephi-reference-inter...
Up to a point, there's an easily distinguishable sound and detail difference between cheaper and more expensive gear, given that you don't cheat (i.e. put cheaper gear in expensive enclosure), but that difference indistinguishable well before these "true audiophile" level stuff.
For example: I run a pair of Heco Celan GT302s. They are not something exotic. 100W per channel, adequately detailed speakers with great soundstage. The manual gives you a table: Wattage -> Recommended wire gauge. I got a high quality, 100% copper cable (from Acoustic Research, so nothing fancy) at the recommended gauge, and connected them. You can't convince me to get a better cable. It's pointless.
Do I enjoy the sound I get, hell yeah. Do I need to listen to my system instead of listening to the music, hell no. I feed the amplifier with a good turntable (which is 40 years old, shocker!) and a good CD player (which is pretty entry level for what's out there), and that's it.
That set will nail any person who likes to listen to the music to its chair. That's the aim of a good system. Same for personal DAPs and DACs. If you enjoy what you have, who cares!
I don't understand how that is cheating. Isn't it a better controlled experiment if the equipment looks the same?
If you want a good controlled experiment, create a literal black box, without any distinguishing features, or lose the box completely and give them an output (speakers or headphones) only.
Another bad thing is, sound is so subjective and experience changes between brands a lot. For example: headphone "burn in" is considered an hallucination, it mostly is. However I have bought a set of RHA MA750i earphones which changed from "This is not what it says on the box" to "am I sure that these are the RHAs I hated" in a month, because it's sound character changed so immensely. No other headphone I had in my life did that.
So, everything is so muddy, subjective and unreproducible. When a room's organization or floor carpet density can change its frequency response, you can't control anything. Moreover, every human's ear profile is different, so you can't be sure that their ear is hearing that the same (e.g. one of my ears have a notch in its hearing curve around mid frequencies. we don't know why it happened).
If anybody wants to learn some of the tricks which can be done to get better sound, please watch Mend it Mark's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RJbpFSFziI
While the £25.000 price tag on that preamp is literal snake-oil level and the builder has the audacity to erase the model numbers of the ICs (and OpAmps) he uses, some of the methods he uses are legit and Mark explains them exceptionally well.
We all know that the aim of a good system is to blow your clothes off ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNZ-nEGHDKk
I mean, I like Mikrotik products just fine. I happen to have a Mikrotik Hex S on my desk in front of me as I write this.
But scroll down and zoom in on the money shot here: https://hifi.nl/artikel/32753/Review-Synergistic-Research-Ne...
And then, for comparison: https://openwrt.org/_media/media/mikrotik/rb760igs/pcb_top.j...
The difference in price between the Mikrotik box and the Synergistic box with the board is north of $2,500.
Also, this explains why I hear some birds chirping and bees buzzing in the beginning of the Pink Floyd's High Hopes (from Pulse). It's possible that the sounds from outside imprint on my wireless signal while streaming it.
Maybe I should buy this Micro^H^H^H^H Synergistic box and connect via it while listening to music. Of course I'll need Cat8 shielded cables, but it'll clear the sound, probably, I hope. /s
- Run the amplifier output through a banana or mud. Even if this somehow works and you can hear the sound, you’ll probably smell it as you cook and/or electrolyze your conductor :) (The banana likely works because the load impedance is very high in the experiment they did. The load impedance with an actual speaker is typically in the ballpark of 8 ohms. I admit I haven’t stuck a pair of multimeter probes in a banana lately, let alone done a proper I-V or AC impedance measurement.)
- Use really long cables. It’s not especially rare to be able to hear and even understand AM radio that gets accidentally picked up on a long cable and converted to baseband by some accidental nonlinearity in the amplifier.
- Use the actual outdoor mud on a rainy day as your conductor. I bet you can get some very loud mains hum like that.
Even audiophiles can probably identify these effects!
Therein, audio from a microphone is sent through progressively-longer cables until the length reaches ~6 miles. It gets pretty muffled-sounding... eventually.
(The longest pair of wires I've sent analog audio through was in the realm of 37 miles, stretching across the countryside. AMA, I guess.)
In general, with low-level analog audio and non-ridiculous lengths, additive noise effects are likely to become audible long before attenuation or especially frequency-dependent attenuation. As a decent heuristic, as long as the DC resistance is small compared to load impedance, the cable impedance is unlikely to be a problem. For the connection from the amplifier to the speaker, additive noise is unlikely to be a problem, so the DC resistance is even a decent heuristic: keep the round-trip resistance below half an ohm or so and you should be fine with most speakers.
That was almost certainly the result of illegal transmitters, but it was annoying. One time I heard a man shouting through the stereo and the signal was hot enough in RF land that it made my X10-controlled lights flash on and off.
Later, I got DirecTV and it became differently-annoying: The noise of the satellite receiver switching bias voltage to select between different LNB polarities was sufficient to make a loud pop through the speakers (again, unaffected by the volume control). This made channel surfing very noisy. I was able to reduce it rather substantially with some very deliberate choices in audio cabling construction.
But with better gear (and with the differential[1] signalling that every avenue of pro audio seeks to use by default), this kind of stuff is usually a complete non-issue.
[1]: We popularly call this kind of connection "balanced," but we're wrong about that since there's usually hardly any concern about impedance matching. But it's definitely consistently differential, so I find this less-popular nomenclature to have the right amount of specificity to ~fit reality.
37 miles?!? Why??
Our sales guy had sold a remote node for a voter system to improve receive coverage for a central dispatch system. (Signal-to-noise voters are pretty neat: They can continuously compare two or more related audio signals and [ideally!] pick the one that is best for use while discarding the others.)
That node wasn't all that far away as the crow flies, but it was a very long way out in telephone cabling miles. It spread across two different telco LATAs.
So we rented this very long series of bits of wire held together by scotchloks and punch blocks and whatever else in telephone world to use, and we used it. It was not a conditioned circuit: Just wire.
The specific endpoints of that wire were kind of neat, too: There was some basic EQ that could be used to help compensate, and (IIRC) some impedance adjustment to dial in the circuit itself.
And there was a continuous pilot tone used to set gain: Apparently, when wire gets really long like that, atmospheric conditions can dynamically change its attenuation.
Putting a pilot tone near the middle of the voice range (to be notched it out later) and using its level to set gain helps to improve consistency.
That wireline stuff all worked pretty well.
(The remote node was ultimately a bust. The sales guy also tried to cram too much shit into one feedline and antenna, and the gear to combine and separate all of those signals ate too much energy to make any of it an improvement over doing nothing at all.
Which is... well, that's exactly what the engineering told him would happen, but he did it anyway.
No part of this was inexpensive.)
The chosen propagation media (wire substitute) wouldn't have significant frequency responses differences for those lengths for that level of power in the audio frequency range.
You'd need to have transmission-line effects kick-in which would occur at higher frequencies and/or if a cross-section of the signal propagation paths would have a significant difference in impedance. All three of the chosen medium act like simple power-sink resistors in this scenario--attenuating the signal consistently across the power frequency spectra.
Seriously, just do a frequency sweep and plot the log of the output responses! But no, that would be far too straightforward an experiment.
What really matters is the signal source, any amplified distortion in the signal, final sonic transducer (speaker), transmission medium (air density), transducer orientation (for higher frequencies), and the individual listener's ear.
"However, the tester surmised that introducing the materials into the circuit is just like adding a resistor in series, and they’re unlikely to distort the audio too much, except by lowering the signal level."
It's really a terrible write-up (AI?), pure click bait.
The final sentence is just garbage:
"They then tried various materials like mud and banana, which, although they’re pretty poor conductors, still seemed to introduce imperceptible changes to the signal, at least for the average person."
What does that even mean? It's trash.
So yeah, audiophiles are in over their heads and tend to attribute near-mystical properties to individual electronic components, but the only tool they can rely on is trial and error. So if you can afford it, and if some of it seemingly sounds better... have fun? You're going to make mistakes, but that's not the end of the world.
But it’s much more fun to spend crazy money on magic rocks and snake oil that make your rich audiophile friends want their own magic rocks.
You realize that the pitch for this is basically the same as the pitch for magic pebbles? It's a cure-all box you put on the wire to make things sound better, for a low price of $1,500 or something like that.
I know enough about signal processing to know that magic pebbles probably work worse, but I can think of many reasons why it might not produce the audio you subjectively like better. I suspect it can't really even correct for many of the real-world issues you might have, because equalization doesn't fix echoes, resonance, etc.
In any case, it's a bit of a strawman, because most audiophiles are not buying pebbles in the first place. They're trying vacuum tubes instead of ICs, or are trying out different op-amps, or stuff like that.
Granted, the space is not easy for people to intuit on their own. It opens the door to a lot of terrible ideas that get propogated by people who don't know any better.
Source: I design and build high-end recording studios for audio professionals.
The problems are multiple;
1. When you move out of the sweet spot to listen anywhere else in the room, the music becomes distorted because you can are now hearing an EQ curve that is compensating for the sweet spot, but has nothing to do with the frequency response in the other listening positions.
2. These automatic systems tend to apply dozens of small EQ bands to the output, which smears the phase relationships of the record and dulls transient response. The feeling is of the record being mushy and dull.
3. These systems cannot account for time-domain ringing issues in the listening room. So a corrective EQ boost to compensate for a dip in the sweet spot will become a loud ringing at that frequency elsewhere in the room.
4. Corrective EQ cannot compensate for the deepest frequency nulls, no matter how much of a compensatory boost you make. A heavy handed boost to compensate this way will cause massive ringing elsewhere in the room.
I could go on.
These automatic room correction devices cause far more problems than they solve. There are ways to apply some EQ correction, but you will get 10x larger returns on performance by addressing acoustic issues introduced by the room, rather than trying to compensate on the speaker outputs.
Source: I design and build high-end recording studios for working audio professionals and tune speaker rigs for Grammy-winning artists.
They aren't. They aren't even seeing statistical noise. There is nothing an "oxygen-free" cable can do to your sound, regardless of your unique particulars. They will still insist it sounds better.
Erin over at Erin's Audio Corner did a really nice video[1] recently which focuses on room treatment, but dives into some of these variables which gives a good insight in why something that works well for you might be horrible in my living room.
One problem is that they will try to convince other people to follow in their obvious nonsense. Convincing someone to spend a bunch of money on an Ethernet cable to make their sound better is victimizing them.
It’s also just symptomatic of a general failure of critical thinking that can become properly dangerous. There’s little fundamental difference between “I swapped in an expensive USB cable and it sounded better so high end USB cable is worth it” and “my kid got his shots and then he got diagnosed with autism so vaccines caused it.”
My preferred equipment today is a MiniDSP 2x4HD, a pair of 8" studio monitors on floor stands, a 12" subwoofer and a tape measure. The whole setup cost maybe $1200 and is nearly indistinguishable from my prior setup which cost easily 10x as much.
If you've got a bunch of money to spend on audio gear, the best thing you can probably buy right now is some rockwool and the time of a construction crew.
I am not an audiophile by any means, but the thing is cables are more than just resistance. Cables radiate energy, cables absorb ambient energy, cables are both capacitors and inductors (both of which will exhibit a frequency-dependent response). Perfect shield, I can't imagine it mattering. Imperfect shield--I can easily see it mattering, although not to the extent they claim.
Don't test against a banana and mud, test against quality wire vs a heap of wire. Test a straight wire with a coil of wire. Test kinked wire. (I'm sure many of us have had bad experiences with network wires that get kinked.)
it's sustainable, apparently. I don't know anything about it really.
Can today's audio systems do that? How much money do I have to spend to get there?
My experience is I hanged out with one band in a garage where they were practicing and I attended couple live music shows in pubs.
Main upside of those live music shows is that they are not "perfect" like playing a record and each one of the gigs will be off here or there, tempo somewhere will be off or a tune will be off - or you are just having enough beers you don't care pick your way :)
That's a very different metric. How good the sound is vs. what the sound is.
If you’re in a band and care about sound quality, bring your own mix guy!
Usually you only get some specially-crafted demo files that are capable of fooling you.
I think people overlook how artificial records are. Even the ones that are ostensibly "natural". Records are "hyper real" in that they are usually crafted to give you an ideal perspective of the entire ensemble. In a sense you can hear "everything" or at least hear everything perfectly balanced and crafted with intention. This could be as simple as dynamic control (compression), artificial spaces (reverb), and distortion or saturation that the average listener will interpret as "natural". In that sense it's an illusion.
Again, this is okay.
Even classical records, which often strive for naturalism use these tools to sculpt the record. Even when they do not employ these techniques I've still never heard a classical record that sounds as good as sitting in a hall in front of a world class orchestra. It's unreal how vivid the sound is when you're in the room with the orchestra. It's breathtaking and something that everyone should aspire to experience at least once.
Never heard a SACD but a CD doesn't have the dynamic range of a live symphonic orchestra. And there is the recording equipment charateristics which matters.
And an objectively good setup is not expensive.
A cheap pair of Sennheiser HD600 for headphones will last effectively forever and sound great paired with a very competitively priced Topping DX3Pro+ for external soundcard/amplifier.
I would guess that this experiment is under powered and no conclusions can be drawn from it.
Audio equipment is produced by engineers and they create elegant solutions to physical constraints. There is a huge difference in quality when hearing a pair of Allison One speakers, or AKG K1000 headphones over an airpod.
Some engineers believe in speaker wire improvements, most don't. Some even openly acknowledge they don't believe but use premium wires to satisfy customers' demands. Most audio forums outright ban the discussion of speaker wire because it's so contentious.
Dismissing the industry that supports audio engineering is dismissing the disciplines of circuit, materials, and sound engineering.
Sure, there are extremes and charlatans out there like the guys who sell magic rocks, but wtf, some of you pay for skins to play in a mmog.
Of course, nothing will change.
This is to expose the people that buy gold wires for USB, a digital protocol.
You are free to spend your money how you like, but extreme diminishing returns are a very much overlooked thing in the "audiophile" circles.
"the industry that supports audio engineering" though — are you sure this support is welcome? It is not unlike asking to treat counterfeit drug producers with dignity and respect because they support medical professionals.
I really do not see how any actual engineer producing audio equipment would not be there if not for a company selling one-directional ethernet cables for 1000/m that improve sound, with a plastic bag filled with gravel that also improves sound... I mean...
Just look at the boxes for half this stuff, quoting peak power for speakers instead of RMS, which is the equivalent of saying "This LED hits 50 watts for .00001 seconds during startup! Wow so amazing! (but don't look at the average 1 watt of output past that)"
The speakers, the cables, the AMPs, even digital source cables nearly all have 90% marketing budgets which drive up the price of many products without increasing quality at all.
I thought my fathers old setup always sounded amazing when I was younger. Coming back to it 20 years later though, it sounds stupidly scooped to my ears. Same speakers but what has changed is the music I was playing on them and what my ears expect to hear. 20 years ago I was more into guitar/bass/drum/vocal music that these speakers were made for.
There is really no such thing as "sound quality". There is just different EQ, frequency range, etc.
The very best deals change every few years though. As soon as word of mouth catches and something becomes too popular the business suits look for ways to take advantage. Scrolling old school style forums for audio enthusiast s can lead you to some good lesser known (and thus cheap) brands though.